ROME: Italian police seized 14 tons of amphetamines made by Daesh in Syria that were found in three freight containers in the port of Salerno.
“This is the biggest seizure of amphetamines in the world,” said Naples’s finance police, which carried out the investigation.
Some 84 million Captagon tablets were found in the containers. The tablets were hidden in machinery.
Dubbed the “jihad drug,” it is produced in Syria and is widely used by Daesh fighters in combat. French investigators said Captagon was used by the terrorists who carried out the attack at the Bataclan theater in Paris, where 90 people were killed in 2015.
A spokesman for Naples’s finance police said Daesh “finances now its terrorist activities mainly by trafficking drugs made in Syria, which in the past few years has become the world’s largest producer of amphetamines.”
Investigators in Naples now fear that Daesh may have developed links with powerful Italian criminal organizations such as the Camorra.
“You don’t normally get all those drugs in a port here in (the Italian region of) Campania if the Camorra don’t know at least,” Franco Roberti, the former anti-mafia national chief prosecutor who is now a member of the European Parliament, told Arab News.
“The Camorra have capillary control of the territory, and it’s very hard to believe that any illegal activity may be carried out in the area without their consent,” he added.
“The port of Salerno could’ve become a hub to smuggle Captagon in the biggest European cities, and that could really be worrying.”
